A winter morning on the beach (E. Cuchel)
Played on: 6th September
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot, in Firefox
How long I spent: 15 mins for one good ending and a few game overs
This game is a kind of slice-of-life phenomenological landscape game. You’re playing as a 60-year-old managing their blood pressure with exercise, finishing their 10,000 steps for the day by ambling along a beach. The gameplay is very gentle and arguably puzzle-free; the emphasis here is on being in a place and being in the moment. If there’s any doubt that the idea is to connect with nature, the informative boards dotted along the beach featuring inspirational quotes related to conservation make it clear.
A winter morning on the beach is parser-driven but embeds clickable links in the text. This is really neat! The listed links lead you to sensory actions that you might not otherwise consider (more on those later), all implemented properly, removing obstacles to engaging with the virtual landscape. If you type in your own commands, you can hammer away at the game and find a few implementation problems – “jump” has not been de-implemented or given a custom response despite the player character being depicted as not really athletic enough for that, “eat” and “taste” are two different verbs with different responses, etc. But those issues only came up when I looked for them. I didn’t have any issues when I engaged with the game on its own terms and stuck to using the hyperlinks. I could see this game being a useful set of training wheels for new players who are just getting used to the text parser.
The game’s listed commands encourage you to engage with the world through your senses; when you look at the sea, you’re encouraged to try smelling, touching and even tasting it. All listed commands get a sensible response. This is an excellent start for a game which tries to evoke a sense of place. However, I think A winter morning on the beach hasn’t gone far enough. There are only three objects you can substantially interact with in a sensory manner, the sea, the sand and the gulls; the whole beach is barren of any other objects, other than the signboards that appear in alternate zones. Once you’re played with these, you’re done experiencing the landscape. I think this could have done with a lot more variation in different zones, and more objects within each zone – shells, seaweed, crabs, the sea breeze, rocks and rockpools, tidal defences… there’s loads of space for expansion here.
(I’m not sure if this is quite fair of me – I don’t know if this game is autobiographical and whether the beach is a real and accurate representation of a place which Cuchel knows. But given that the author credits another website with the quotes on the boards, I imagine that those boards are additions at least, and if there’s been one addition made to reinforce the themes of the game, perhaps there’s room for more?)
There is a winning ending to the game which you can find by completing your 10,000 steps (plus solving a very simple puzzle in the coda). You start at around 7,000 steps (the exact number is randomised), and every move north or south adds another 100 or so to the counter. Walking too many turns in a row overexerts the player character’s body, which is fair enough, and easily managed by stopping to read the signboards whenever you see one. What’s not fair enough is the ending you get by lingering in one spot for too long, where a seagull craps on you and you have to abandon the walk. That’s an issue because this is a game that’s encouraging you to take in the landscape and engage with a sense of place and beauty, but you get a game over if you take your time examining objects. The stress (for want of a less extreme word) of needing to continually manage movement does not cohere with the atmosphere the game seems to be going for.
This adventure is filtered through some visually striking web page styling. The game text is rendered in blocky green-on-black text, resembling a retro-computer interface, accompanied by a photograph of the beach as the page background. It’s some impressive styling and I admire the work that’s gone into it, though I do wonder if it’s the right choice for this game. The lurid green and black colours and the pixelated font are pulling in a completely different aesthetic direction from the coastal setting and the picture of the ocean in the background, so for me they present an obstacle to immersing myself in the seascape, reminding me that I am, in fact, playing a computer game. The clickable hyperlinks would be really helpful (especially for inexperienced parser players) to avoid the friction of parser errors and facilitate immersion in the game’s world, so it’s a shame that the styling breaks that immersion again.
This has been a harsher review than I really meant to write. I do think A winter morning on the beach is a worthwhile game, and I appreciated the idea, the efforts made with the web implementation, and the cute-as-buttons epilogue. But I think there are missed opportunities to push the environmental and experiential themes of the game and to cohere them into something more.